The Roxy

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3 out of 5 stars

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With Metro, Astoria and Astoria 2 gone, it’s The Roxy that has taken over as the student staple, offering the usual selection of seriously cheap drinks and made-for-the-masses anthems. On Wednesdays a club night offers a mixture of old school hip hop, grime, drum & bass and reggae. Thursday brings Teenage Kicks – a selection of indie, electro and punk. On Fridays Big Night Out brings a guaranteed singalong as DJs blast out indie, pop and rock from the last five decades.

Having read some of the other reviews on the Roxy I've realised the incredibly negative experience I had last night with a group of friends was not an isolated one. Me and a group of friends arrived at the Roxy around 12am on a Tuesday night and were queuing for half an hour. Whilst queuing, people around us in the queue and the people I was with noticed how rude and aggressive the bouncer monitoring the queue was. A group of three boys in front of us voluntarily left the queue because of this. We also saw other people being taken out from the queue for being "too drunk" although they were clearly not. After half an hour we reached the front of the queue where we were told that one of the people I was with was too drunk and to go get her some coffee and come back later. The Roxy was our first stop of the night and we had only had a couple of drinks at home, we were by no means in any way drunk especially not to the extent to be refused entry.

We disputed the bouncer who refused us entry but he was not interested in listening and he also seemed very smug and enjoying having the control to refuse entry to a group of young women. We felt he behaved in a very unprofessional way and when we asked his name he refused to tell us it and he also covered his name tag on his uniform the entire time. We felt he did this because he was aware of how unjustified and unprofessional he was behaving. We repeatedly asked to speak to the manager but the security staff would not cooperate. We asked people we had spoken to in the queue who were now in the smoking area to get the manager and they came back and told us she had said she was too busy. These same people were also warned not to speak to us by the bouncer who refused us entry which seemed completely unreasonable, after another half an hour finally the manager came out to speak to us, we asked her name which she said was Beth, at this point the doorman we had dealt with finally told us his name was Damian. Beth agreed that we did not seem drunk but despite this we were still refused entry and she clearly did not care at all, so we left.

The next day we rang up the Roxy to make a complaint. The man we spoke to, Simon, claimed to be the general manager. I am not someone who usually makes complaints about places but I found him incredibly unreasonable and unhelpful. Despite not being present on the night we were discussing, he made assumptions that we were very drunk and that Damian's behaviour was justified. He gave very generic excuses and insinuated our experience was an isolated one despite the numerous reviews I have read of people who've experienced something similar. We asked him to contact us by email with what he was going to do about our complaint and he refused to take our e-mail address. Since the venue refused to take our complaint seriously I have been forced to leave a poor review.

Would NOT recommend the Roxy unless you want to be victimised and unfairly treated by security who are on a power trip.